2009 | Finch Sells

There’s More To Life Than Affiliate Marketing

Sep 10 2009

I’ve been doing affiliate marketing for over a year now. In that year I’ve earnt more money than I made in the rest of my working life. I’ve quit my day job, gone a long way to securing my future, and made a lot of good contacts in the business. All a few months shy of my 22nd birthday.

But is it really worth it?

How much money does a man need before he’s finally happy? Everywhere I look, I see bloggers throwing out tips for how to make more cash. How to turn thousands in to tens of thousands. It’s great if you’ve got your back against the wall financially. But what is the end goal? What really makes you happy?

I’m tired of working 16 hour days, six or seven days a week. It’s gruelling. I’ve paid the ultimate price for it. I’ve lost something that actually matters.

I thought I’d get a lot of happiness out of running my own business – and I do. But it’s not what I want to be thinking about when I fall asleep at night. There’s more to life than affiliate fucking marketing.

So pro tip of the day: Take a break.

Go see the kids. Tell the wife you love her. Enjoy how far you’ve come. Whatever.

Just don’t be sitting there ten years from now with your only happiness being that split second it takes to refresh stats. I think I need to take a break and reconsider what I’m trying to achieve with my career. You don’t really hear much about it through the industry blogs – but if you’re sat at your 9-5 right now dreaming of a brighter future, this path isn’t always the right one. The life of an affiliate marketer is generally lonely.

I’ve been reading a book called Awaken The Giant Within by Anthony Robbins. Now I don’t normally buy in to the self-help bullshit that most of America seems to adore. But there’s a metaphor which is pretty fitting for what I’m trying to say:

Most people live what I call “The Niagra Syndrome”. I believe that life is like a river, and that most people jump on the river of life without ever really deciding where they want to end up. So, in a short period of time, they get caught up in the current: current events, current fears, current challenges. When they come to forks in the river, they don’t consciously deide where they want to go, or which is the right direction for them. They merely “go with the flow”. They become a part of the mass of people who are directed by the environment instead of by their own values. As a result, they feel out of control. They remain in this unconcious state until one day the sound of raging water awakens them, and they discover that they’re five feet from Niagra Falls in a boat with no oars. At this point, they say “Oh, shoot!” But by then it’s too late. They’re going to take a fall. Sometimes it’s an emotional fall. Sometimes it’s a physical fall. Sometimes it’s a financial fall. It’s likely that whatever challenges you have in your life currently could have been avoided by some better decisions upstream.

I remember interpreting that passage as people not taking a chance on their ambitions and one day realizing that they’ve achieved nothing. But there’s a different meaning when the river is money.

I used to think that making thousands of dollars every month would make me happy and open up the doors to chase opportunities that would otherwise be closed. It turns out, most of the things I was chasing were there all along.

Stop posting your links on Google and go do something worthwhile for the day. Better than living in regret.

How To Make Money On Somebody Else’s Forum (Part 2/2)

Sep 08 2009

This is the second of a two part post showing how to make some good money by marketing on forums. If you haven’t read the first part, you should probably go and do that right about now.

Hopefully you managed to muster a couple of vaguely promising ideas. But it’s gotta be said. There’s a learning curve for marketing on forums. You might not think so, but there is. You need to appreciate that marketing on somebody else’s site, somebody else’s forum, it’s the sort of activity that requires respect. Respect for other peoples’ business.

How many people read the last post and shot off to find some weight loss forum where they could cheaply sling some berries? I assumed this was what many would do. But realize before you learn the hard way – a badly thought out forum campaign will bring you more hate mail than conversions. Not least from the owner of the site you’ve just manipulated.

If you’re promoting a rebill using forum marketing, you’re walking one hell of a thin line. What do forum communities like to do like no other? They like to talk shit. Nothing’s gonna get Off Topic buzzing like a member filing a complaint over some shitty rebill he purchased through the forum’s recommendation. What I’m trying to say here is that although a forum owner may be all too happy to accept your Paypal, that’s no reason to get sloppy with your marketing.

If you’re heart set on promoting a rebill to a forum community, don’t do it directly. Use a squeeze page and build a mailing list. Transfer their email to your own list and then do your thing. Think long term. If the forum owner discovers that you’re bombarding his memberlist with direct endorsements for one of the scammiest online purchases of 2010, he’s gonna shut you down and shut you out. I don’t blame him.

That’s not to say that you can’t leverage forum memberlists for a rebill offer. You just need to shift that email in to your own database before you do it. The alternative is one profitable mailshot, one extremely unhappy community, one pissed off owner and Baby Jesus drowning in a cradle of tears.

Right, that said. What is the best way to make money on a forum? I know people love being spoonfed how-to guides and top ten tips, but I’m gonna cut the crap and list you some of your options.

Sign up, put a link in your sig and post like you’re the expert on fucking everything.

Otherwise known as The Warrior Forum Technique, this tactic can generate vast sums of income approaching $2.77 p/hour before tax. If you really want to live with the best, you should pick up an avatar from wherever the pedobears are uploading their vacation photos these days. Better yet, offer members of said forum an outrageous 70% discount coupon so they only feel 30% as ripped off when they cave in to your drivel.

Yes, this technique is followed by the masses. The masses are not rich. While I don’t doubt for a second that a little viral buzz can go a long way, you wouldn’t be reading an affiliate marketing blog if you actually had something worthwhile to sell. You can probably use a sig link to cash in a few sales – but what a joyous life to look forward to. Forum monkey. Tell the grandkids.

Blitz members with a whirlwind of Private Messages.

You know the drill. Sign up using your sister’s email, write out one massively impersonal advertising plea and then send it to everybody online. As you sit back and press the Send button on that last PM, you realize that you’ve accidentally messaged a moderator – who’s banned you, removed all your PM history and swiftly rendered the last half hour utterly meaningless. This method is another top hit at Digital Point. The worrying thing I’ve learnt from marketing is that people wouldn’t be doing this shit if they didn’t at least make some kind of return on their investment.

Buy banner space for a flat rate monthly fee.

This is more like it. Forum members are used to refreshing the same old index page and seeing the same old usernames in the same old threads. A fresh new sparkling banner WILL draw their attention – for a very short time.

I like banner campaigns on forums. But to make them work, you absolutely have to be shooting at a large forum where the number of unique visitors is high. Banner blindness will set in after the first few pageloads and you’ll see a rapid decline in CTR if you don’t have the benefit of fresh traffic.

When you’re negotiating a price with a forum owner, if he’s smart, he’ll try to catch you with the “page views per month” trick. Don’t buy in to that. A forum has an artificially inflated number of page loads in its traffic logs.

1. The same users are loyal and like to click back and forth.
2. Topics are divided in to numerous pages. Although you might receive 50 impressions, it ain’t much good if they’re all from the same old dog cruising through jailbait archives since 1995.
3. Page loads never meant shit anyway.

If you’re going to buy banner space, find out how many unique hits you’ll be getting for your buck and then DO YOUR RESEARCH. Also beware of rotating banner spaces – start dividing traffic stats if you’re placed on a rotation. Find out the exact demographics of the forum. Is it worthwhile renting out a banner space that promotes an American product when the majority of the forum’s visitors are scattered around the world?

Take the lower converting International offer, not the hot-shit-US-only product that does the business for you with search. You don’t have as much control over your targeting on a forum. If you’re going to get country-specific, make sure you have a geolocating script ready to ping your clickers to where they need to be.

Oh and don’t make the classic amateur mistake of direct linking to your offer without cloaking. If the offer gets pulled from a network, you’re the fool who should have stayed at the grocery counter.

As a rule of thumb, I prefer to target banner spaces that appear in slightly unusual areas of a forum. I like to drill down and target just one particular subforum, where the category is relevant, and then get my banner placed directly below the first post in each thread. You’ll draw on a lot of search engine eyeballs. Remember that people often ignore advertising spots instinctively. The 468×60 slot at the top of the page might look pretty, but how many people turn a blind eye to ads when they’re expecting to see ads?

Purchase a sticky thread.

This generally works a lot better on smaller forums. Or just big forums with broke ass owners. If you can provide the text for your advertisement, the topic title and the forum that you need it to go in – the admin only has to copy and paste. He’s made instant profit.

If you really want to draw some attention, pay for one of those nice global announcements and disguise your offer as an engaging “forum contest”. The prospect of a prize should get them opening the message, then it’s down to you to prove your worth with some gentle persuasion. Christ knows, I can think of at least a dozen offers that would be viable for promoting in this way. Get hold of an offer that’s pro-incentive and go nuts.

Send out a paid email to the entire forum.

I discussed this in Part 1 of the post, so go back and read that for a reminder.

One last point though – think before you email the forum owner. Back when I was getting started with forum marketing, I made the mistake time and time again of rushing my proposal. I’d be so excited at the moneymaking potential of MY side of the deal that I’d forget to sell HIS side of the deal.

Don’t portray yourself as some scratching-for-riches affiliate marketer who needs a break and wants your forum to be the launch pad. You’ve gotta put yourself across as knowledgeable and polite. But most importantly you have to sell the ease at which the owner can accept your offer.

He probably won’t want to help you come up with a good email text, so have it prepared beforehand. His job should be as simple as copy and pasting your shit in to vBulletin, pressing send, and accepting the Paypal funds on the way out. If you don’t simplify the process, you won’t get a reply. I believe Ruck had a great post about this which you should be able to dig out somewhere on the Convert2Media forum. I can’t remember what he said. But whatever it was, I bet it was shit hot.

I’m not gonna waste anymore time preaching about the money to be had using this kind of marketing so if you’ve got a question, reach me on my email.

How To Make Money On Somebody Else’s Forum (Part 1/2)

Sep 02 2009

One of the toughest tasks in affiliate marketing is finding targeted traffic that doesn’t break the bank. No doubt about it. It’s tougher than installing a flog, tougher than researching ‘o chosen keywords of the fat, and a whole lot tougher than scouring Affbuzz.

I see a lot of people exploring PPC platforms as if they’re the center of the CPA universe. You’ve got another bunch of guys who will spend Monday to Friday resubmitting disapproved ads on Facebook. But what’s the end goal? Surely it’s to find targeted traffic, right? To find traffic that backs out. Well, if you step away from those popular marketing hubs, you can find a lot of untapped traffic sources where the costs are still low.

Forum marketing, for me, is one of the most cost effective methods of reaching a targeted audience. The clue is in the name itself. It’s a forum of people who have already registered on a site because they’re passionate or interested in the subject matter.

Qualifying traffic is so important. If you find the right niche forum, you’ve already qualified that traffic. You’ve simply gotta find an offer that catches the imagination of the crowd at hand.

I hate to mention his name again. I really need to branch out, I know. But for this post, I’m gonna need to go back to my favourite CPA niche of the last 3 months.

So I was on this Michael Jackson forum…

And this was about a month after his death. It was a booming community with I can’t even remember how many active members. Something like 20,000.

It got me thinking. Every single email in that forum database has a relation. Nobody’s going to sign up at a Michael Jackson forum, when he’s still alive, without having some genuine affection for the plastic fantastic himself.

That’s 20,000 targeted emails. You know what else I like about Michael Jackson’s fans? The fact that they’ll bend over backwards and take one for the team if you tell them that filling in your unrelated zip submit will bring his black ass back to life.

I didn’t go that far, obviously. A man’s gotta have morals.

This is where monetizing a niche forum really excels though. If I asked you to write down three character traits that you’d associate with a Michael Jackson forum owner – what would you put?

Obsessed?
Devoted and black?
Middle aged cuckold fanboy?

…how about CPA marketer?

Yeah, didn’t think so. Most niche forum owners are there for the community factor, it’s as simple as that. Their payment comes in the form of posts, threads, new members and the self-satisfaction that comes from having a bold fucking username.

But what most forum owners don’t realize is that there’s a lot of money to be had in their forum database. And where they don’t realize it themselves, we as affiliate marketers, have an open window to hop in and monetize their database for them.

I know for a fact that if you email a mid-sized forum owner with a simple “Hey, nice board. I was wondering if you could drop your members a sponsored email? Willing to send $300 to your Paypal today.” Most will bite your damn hand off. A typical forum owner won’t stop to consider why it is that you can afford to spend $300 on a long-forgotten function in his vBulletin admin panel. A typical forum owner won’t care. You know why? Server costs! Bandwidth costs! In this case, probably Jacko memorabilia costs!

Straight up money will sway the large majority of forum owners. It beats the slow trickle of Adsense clicks, and it gets them thinking: “What if he wants to send ANOTHER email tomorrow?” “I could make money posting his links on vBulletin!” You know the drill. People like quick cash. Most of you probably making a living on the fantasy.

Forum owners value their sites less than CPA marketers. A forum owner, more often than not, will judge value by active members. How thriving is his community? If he’s got 100,000 registered members, but only 100 of them actually post – he’s likely to think that anybody with business acumen is going to also judge his community on those same factors.

But if I’m looking at a Michael Jackson forum of 20,000 registered members, my eyes are firmly on the emailing possibilities. I could care less how many middle aged Californian housewives are posting their top ten tracks in the Off Topic Room.

If you have a CPA offer paying out at $1.60…and you’re converting a mere 1% of that original memberlist – that’s still $320 revenue. All from jumping on the sack of somebody else’s hard work. Start looking at more realistic conversion percentages and it’s easy to see how an affiliate marketer can afford to pay a nice fee to the forum admin for the privilege.

This should get a few ideas flowing for monetizing niche forums out there. I’m gonna split the post in half and reveal how to actually do it without screwing up like a complete retard next time. Happy hunting.

Pro tip: Don’t try this on Wickedfire.